Funny Church Signs

Submission 25,318

About

Funny Church Signs are various marquees and signboards featuring humorous biblical quotes and other religious messages, including authentic signs that are placed on display by members of the church and fake images of church signs that are digitally produced via custom caption generators online. On the Internet, user-submitted photographs of actual church signs featuring irreverent messages and images of fake marquees have been circulating through internet humor sites since the early 2000s, similar to other memes from that same era, such as funny store signs and funny news headlines.

Origin

The earliest known website to curate church signs featuring humorous or irreverent messages can be credited to the Church Sign Generator,^[1] which was created by Austin-based web developer Ryland Sanders in 2004. According to the FAQs section on its parent website, Says-It.com,^[2] the idea came about when Sanders began photoshopping images of actual church signs he had photographed for fun and shared a few examples on his blog. After readers of his blog responded by submitting their own church sign photos, Sanders decided to launch a webpage devoted to curation of humorous church signs.^[3]

Spread

Shortly after its creation, Sanders soon noticed that a few of the user-submitted images were intentionally edited to read vulgar messages, which he found humorous and ultimately inspired him to code a program that would allow anyone to easily superimpose a custom message over blank template images of marquee signs found at the church entrances. On January 31st, 2004, Sanders created a website powered by the code, along with several blank photo templates (shown below), under the dedicated domain name ChurchSignGenerator.com.^[4] Sometime in 2009, the website was acquired by Says-It.com.